Category Archives: Agression

How We’re Wired

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Nature vs Nurture

Nature versus nurture is one of the seemingly perpetual debates.  The reason for all the controversy is because both positions are true.  I think most of our behavior is from how we were raised and educated.  There are also fundamental characteristics of our species stemming from the way we evolved.  Primitive humans had two basic needs for survival.  They could not function and have children without a community providing mutual support.  They also needed fear and aggression to  protect the group from attacks from animals and rival tribes.

So here we are, wired to connect with others and nurture children and relationships. We are also programmed for flight or fight responses when under threat.  It isn’t Satan making all this trouble, it’s us.  A single person out there on the veldt won’t last long among the lions and mammoths.  If he joins up with others, they can build protection from predators and provide shelter.  All they then need are food sources and something to clothe themselves with.

If the people are out of their enclosure and encounter a Sabre-Toothed Tiger or a rival from a neighboring tribe they have two responses.  They can stand their ground and fight the enemy or flee.  Encountering the threat triggers several internal responses.  The body goes on high alert, releasing adrenaline, tensing muscles, increasing respiration, and so on.  We are then better equipped to fight off the threat or run.

We run home, where we can get support from family members and members of our tribe.  We are then better equipped to fight.  The community provides defense.  The members have gathered together to raise babies, find mates, play poker, dance, kick balls, and get sick and die together.  If we are in Michigan, we are trained to dislike Ohio State.

The need for coming together to meet threats is institutionalized into sport.   We also get together to run and jump training to flee if necessary.  The two mechanisms are working in concert for pleasure.  Michiganders don’t seek to kill Ohioans.  Ethiopians often try to kill Eritreans.

Warfare between groups is most often for territory, power, or simple greed.  Groups ally themselves with other groups to meet a threat or defuse threats.  All the strife and conflict occurs within and between groups.  It has been going on as long as we have been a species.

There is a remedy using our innate need for community.  We nurture and support those in our community then expand the support and nurturing to all.  I can’t directly support the one billion Chinese but I can pray for them.  The act of praying opens my heart, building empathy and lovingkindness for the billions out there.  The others praying together create a web of connection, acting across oceans and nations to bring us all together.

There are also forces attempting to tear us apart, stemming from the we-they response.  The twentieth century is an example of the we-they response going wildly out of control and killing millions of people.

I think the  natural world wide web of human interconnection, lovingkindness, and empathy is keeping the strife from destroying us all.  My goal is to build as much lovingkindness within my own community.  I also believe praying for all beings to be safe, happy, and free works to strengthen the web of connection.  Keep it up, folks, our civilization depends on us.

Posted in Agression, Fear, Lovingkindness, Stories

Puppies and Kittens

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I was lamenting the current political situation with someone recently.  She says she spends down time looking at videos and pictures of puppies and kittens. She mostly avoids the news.  My approach is quite different.  I look at car crashes in Russia, high speed chases in     L. A., eruptions, earthquakes, forest fires, burning and collapsing buildings, and urban shootouts.

I do look at cute cat and dog stuff, but end up watching violent cat fights and cats chasing dogs.  What is wrong with me?  Yes, horrible things are being done by and to our government, but will my preoccupation with it all is not gonna do much good out there.  I have always been a news junkie, so maybe all this is unavoidable.  But, even my humor is turning black.  I like to tell old jokes, but even they are about some variety of mayhem.

Do you know about the Polynesian King who had just made a pact with a neighboring king to stop all the stealing and poaching that had been going on for years.  To celebrate, the neighboring king gave him an ornate hand carved throne.  The king had it installed in the Great hall of his thatched palace and had his old throne stored upstairs.  One day he was on his new throne and the old throne came cracking down from the thatched ceiling and killed him.  The moral is “People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.”

I hadn’t thought about that joke in years, but this morning it came bubbling up out of my unconscious.  I told the story to my wife and it ruined our morning tea and chat session.  So the mess out there is creating an internal mess.  What to do?  I have only managed to get halfway through The Princess Bride, and I did Harry Potter last fall.  Is it time to reread Tolkien or should I give in and read Faust and Neitzsche?

The dark side of the Force seems to be upon me.  Yoda always told Luke to not give in to hate and rage.  My new pen and pencil holder is a Darth Vader coffee cup.  I guess I haven’t taken the message to heart.  I think I need a road trip.

Posted in Agression, Cats, Current Activities, Depression, Humor, Obsession, Stories

I am an Evangelical

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Augustine

Well, not really.  But I was one.  I was raised a Methodist, and had a profound conversion experience into a Pentecostal denomination.

Yes, they were evangelical.  Evangelicals tend to take the Bible literally and have traditional beliefs about sexuality, marriage, abortion, and politics.  I hold none of those views.  I’m a liberal of the kind vilified on Fox News.  I retain some Christian beliefs, but am a practicing Buddhist.

I have an extensive library on Christianity.  Most of the books are about the relatively new thinking about Jesus and the Bible, most of them anathema to an evangelical.  I do accept the historical reality of Jesus, but that is about as far as it goes.  I tend to view it all from an historical perspective.

Regarding God, nobody knows for sure.  Most every culture deals with God in some fashion, but my view is he was extrapolated from the spirit world, entities who exist, but in my view are no more deities than we are.  Like us they would like to be gods, but only Donald Trump has made it.

I am from a milieu steeped in the old time religion.  It is ironic that the concept of original sin came from Augustine, a Catholic Scholastic.  His idea about the event in the garden leading to human depravity rather than free will leads directly to the idea Jesus assumed our sinful nature to release us from God’s curse.  John said God loved us and freed us from sin on the cross, but Augustine said God let Jesus atone for our depravity.

John Calvin

American evangelical Protestantism adopted Augustine.  Conservatives: we’re bad.   Liberals: we’re good, but need help because the event in the Garden gave us free will.  We can choose, a coyote can’t.  But, we sometimes make bad choices.

For several reasons, deep down I believe I’m bad.  I am engaged in overcoming that belief, with limited and intermittent success.  Sometimes I feel good about myself, sometimes I don’t.

I really don’t like Augustine, Calvin, and their wrathful God.  My father and grandfather had that Scots Presbyterian Calvinist outlook even though they were not religious.  I caught it from them.  The underlying attitude was nobody could ever measure up, including me and them.  There, ladies, and gentlemen, is a prescription for an unhappy life.  My mother was raised Congregationalist, another Calvinist denomination (no longer, however).

Grandfather, Father, and Mother were pretty nice people, which revealed their true natures, but under it all they thought they were lost souls.  As our current self-appointed deity would say, “Sad.”.   I’m afraid some part of me will always believe I am really a bad dude, which I caught from them.

Our culture remains contaminated with the evangelical attitude.  I sit here in the coffee shop next to Denver University, started in 1864 as a Methodist school.  The Methodists have never been quite as infected by Calvinism, coming from Anglican roots, but that need for redemption is still there.  The idea behind DU was to bring the gospel to the wilderness.  That was fine, but there was an underlying belief those naked heathen Indians were beyond redemption.  John Evans, the Methodist territorial governor in 1864 and a co-founder of DU, and John Chivington, a Methodist minister and Colonel of the Third Volunteer Cavalry Regiment decided those murdering heathens had to go.  Thus, the Sand Creek Massacre.

The streets at DU are Methodist, starting with Wesley, the Anglican who founded Methodism.  Looking west from Evans Avenue one sees Mt. Evans, both named after an Indian killer.  I live between Evans and Asbury Avenues.  Asbury is named for the first Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop in the United States.  I don’t seem to be able to get away from it.  The current DU students, however, don’t seem to be as infected with that stuff as I am.  The architects designing buildings at DU don’t seem to have gotten the message.  Even the big athletic field House has a bell tower. The old part of the campus has several spires and bell towers.

The University of Denver has, to its credit, recognized the tragedy of Sand Creek and the role of the Methodist founder of DU in the act of genocide.  DU is no longer evangelical, but has the history.  I am no longer evangelical, but I carry the history.

Posted in ADD, Addiction, Agression, Family History, Free Will, Jesus, John Calvin, Moral Decline, My Story, Original Sin, Stories

Cops and Repression

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Cops are a constant presence in our lives.  When I was a young kid, the town marshal in Fruita drove a red Ford pickup with no lights or siren.  It wasn’t long before there were real police with a cruiser.  I have a lot of interactions with police officers because I am a lousy driver.  
Cops

Cops

The first really negative interaction was during all the demonstrations following the invasion of Cambodia in 1968.  We peace creeps stood across the barrier from helmeted Fort Collins police officers who could hardly restrain themselves from bashing heads.  They were putting up with a lot of verbal abuse.  The cop across from me was hyperventilating.  Fortunately, nothing happened. 

Cops today are shooting people and getting shot.  Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore showed the nation how the police are an instrument of repression in some cities.  Fortunately this is not always the case.  After 9-11, Denver Water placed armed guards at the gates to the water treatment plants.  Most of the guards were retired or off duty Denver Police Officers moonlighting.  They usually worked one shift per week, and I got to know many of them at the plant where I worked. 

It was a shock to me to discover that most of them were really nice guys.  That did not fit my stereotype of cops.  A couple of them, however, were not nice guys.  They were right wing bullies filled with fear and anger.  The hate they projected was almost physically tangible.  They did not make eye contact and their speech was formal with an undercurrent of menace. 

I am sure every police department of any size in the land has a contingent of those fellows.  They are the enforcers, using violence to deal with undesirables.  They are relatively safe form reprisal because of the need for police to provide mutual support to one another.  There is a code of silence and even lying to cover for a fellow officer.  This is more common in some departments than others. 

These men serve as instruments of repression, usually to minorities.  Their self-appointed job is to keep undesirables in line, using any method they think they can get away with, including murder.in the USA, their targets are usually black, with Latinos and other minorities as alternate targets.  

Ferguson Riot

Ferguson Riot

At one time, most of the racial repression came from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, with their cross burnings, beatings, and lynchings.  Today, those groups have waned, and another means of repression has replaced them-rogue cops and rogue police departments.  Cops and police departments have always been part of the system of racial repression, but now they are the default lynchers.  There are no cross burnings on South Table Mountain in Golden these days. 

This system has run into trouble because almost anyone with a smartphone can record police violence and get the recordings to the media.  The code of silence is broken.  In times of unrest like today, the violent incidents are on the television screen every evening, just like the atrocities in Vietnam were in the 1960s.  Change in technology has made those conducting the new lynchings vulnerable.  The old system of other cops and prosecutors allowing the lynchers to get away with their brutality is not gone, as  Baltimore has recently shown, but it’s days are numbered. 

It may be that one factor creating the Trump phenomenon is the breakdown of repression.  The white working class, already hit by the loss of industrial jobs, is facing competition from people who were once sentenced to remain at the bottom.  White working class men once had those minorities to look down on.  Now the minorities are on the City Council and the police department.   

 

Posted in Agression, Cops, Fear, History, Polarization, Politics, Race, Stories

Aggression and Fear

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baby fearFear is part of life.  We are wired to react to threats in a number of ways.  Fight, flight, freeze, hide, cry for help.  In our society, there is little to fear.  In most of the country there is little violence.  Sometimes we experience a flash of fear in traffic, or when we slip on the ice.  For the most part, however, we are safe.

Why, then, to we have a culture of fear?  Gun and ammunition sales are booming, security system companies are busy, people are taking self-defense classes, and living with fear and anxiety on a daily basis.

Within our generally safe country there are acts of violence.  School shootings, workplace violence, robberies, gang shootings, random killings, on and on.  These acts, if horrific, are but a small part of life in a country of 314 million people.  They just do not affect most people.  The only time I have been truly terrified was when I was caught in a lightning storm when hiking above timberline.   I have never run so fast as that day.

The most important fear creator is television.  It is hard to get good video of a drop in the unemployment rate, but easy to show police cars, fire engines, ambulances, yellow crime scene tape, and bodies on gurneys.  The longest running TV shows are cop shows and doctor shows, with lives hanging in the balance every week.  “If it bleeds, it leads”, the mantra of local TV news.

Yes, they are showing real violence, but I have personally never been a victim of violence.  As a volunteer firefighter, I did see the aftermath of terrible accidents, but we were there to respond to those events.  In my daily life in the same area, I never saw an accident.

Life has always been marked by violence.  We are wired to deal with it.  Adrenalin, anger, the need to assemble in groups for mutual protection, all are part of our DNA.  In watching elementary school children in a park, I was always struck by the boy’s tendency to pick up a stick at the first opportunity.  The girls would respond to aggression from boys,  but tended not to initiate aggressive behavior.

Agression

Agression

Are the boys hunters or warriors, or are those behaviors modifiers of the same thing?  I am currently reading about Ancient Greece.  The tales are of war or the challenges of dealing with a dangerous world.  Very few cultures have not been violent to some degree.  There is always peril, whether from the neighboring tribe or the saber-toothed tiger.

Fear has always been a part of life.  Today, despite all the turmoil in the world, in this country we enjoy one of the safest countries and times ever.  The prevailing mindset, however, is fear.  Growing up in the 1950s I ran all over town and always walked the seven blocks to school.  Today children are accompanied by an adult when on the street.  It is more and more unusual to see unaccompanied young teenagers out on the street.

Because of some events in my early childhood, I have never felt safe.  I always have a strategy for dealing with a threat (back against the wall).  I have never in my threescore and ten years had to deal with a threat.  Because of my impulsivity and deep-seated anger I have sometimes initiated aggression, but usually calm down before getting myself in big trouble. I do seem to be getting better at letting go of the anger.

Is that the answer?  Aggression breeds aggression?  Especially with childhood abuse?  The old Johnny Cash song, A Boy Named Sue, is an example.  Father knew he would abandon his son, so he named the boy Sue in order for him to be abused and have to fight back to survive.  Abandonment and the target of aggression became that boy’s life.  He grew up to be angry and aggressive.  The song implies that is a good thing.  It is not.

When children grow up in a loving, fairly safe home with the knowledge they are loved and respected, they are able to deal with threats in a healthier way, knowing they will always have a refuge.  We need to provide love, compassion, support, and respect for all children.  A lot of that exists here, but how about the Sudan?  It is a sad world.  Work to end injustice and violence everywhere.  Foster compassion.

Posted in Agression, Fear, History, My Story, Stories